27 June 2008

In this technological day and age there is so much going on. So much to know, keep track of and learn in order to stay 'up-to-date.'

Self Induced Problem
The problem is we create the problem. We don't have to own the digital camera, the Tivo, the HD camcorder, the plasma TV, the car with NavLink or rear DVD system, the iPod/Zune, the portable DVD player, the iPhone/Windows Mobile equivalent, or even the fancy pop up toaster for that matter.

Truth is we love gadgets. We love the fact that there is something new out there that can take a little piece of our daily existence and either make it smaller, faster or more powerful than the previous solution. But in doing so we actually clutter up our lives. When we have 25 devices to do 25 things with 250 page user manuals for each one you can't tell me we are simplifying our lives!

Fact: We probably aren't giving up our gadgets.

So I love it when a company like Apple works their @!*# off to simplify it for us (even though I don't own Apple products at this time).

I knew they had a wide range of solutions in their arsenal but my friend Adam Callender recently introduced me to a new one. He and his wife both own MacBook Pro's and will probably end up with iPhones in the near future. But the cool tool I'm talking about is the Time Capsule.

In essence this one piece of equipment would replace my D-Link router, my external hard drive (that's 1TB worth of external hard drive) and any sort of backup software I purchased to make life easier.

Here are a few of the things it does for you:

• Server grade storage (500GB or 1TB)
  
• Wireless network (5x the performance and 2x the range due to 802.11n)
• Wireless drive sharing
• Wireless print services
• Built in security
  
• Works with iPhone, Apple TV and more...

Amazing! Especially in recent days for me. I now the following products that make backup a nightmare:

• Nikon D40x (10MP stills that produce close to 5MB files per picture in JPEG format)
  
• Sony HDR-SR11 (AVCHD camcorder with 10MP still capability)

At this point I have been dumping it all on the desktop, manually transferring it to an external hard drive and then uploading all images to SmugMug as added backup. If I had the Time Capsule, I would simply download the files to the computer and Time Capsule would pull them over to the external drive in the background. I seriously doubt it would upload them to SmugMug for you but you can't have everything.

In the PC world I'm sure you can put together a solution like this if you know what you are doing. But how cool is it that Apple puts it together for you - allowing you to keep working on that whole simplification thing...